Horror in Paradise (28 page)

June 8, 1892

The steamer
Claudine
was detained till six o’clock last evening waiting for the court.

Pulolo, the Lanai murderess, and her band of accomplices in that horrible tragedy were marched from the prison to the steamer by policemen, a crowd of natives following them all the way. Pulolo was dressed in a new blue dress but had no shoes on. She wore a native
loulu
hat. Several native women were eager to catch a glimpse of the tragical kahuna, but when they saw her, she being only a small woman, they gnashed their teeth, wishing that she was in glory. The police encountered no small trouble in their efforts to prevent the eager visitors from coming too close to the person of Pulolo.

June 16, 1892

The
Kinau
arrived yesterday and brought news of the conclusion of the famous Lanai murder case, full particulars of which were published at the time. The evidence of the witnesses placed on the stand fully authenticated the accounts previously published and showed that the murders committed were due to what must be regarded as an outbreak of cruelty, animal ferocity, and degraded superstition all combined. A
nol. pros,
was entered as to five of the defendants, and a verdict of murder in the second degree found by the jury in the case of five others,
viz.
Pulolo the kahuna and four of the men implicated with her. Kala, the father of the murdered child, was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment and Keola Kakaia and Keliikuewa to twenty years’ each. In the case of Pulolo, the principal, sentence was reserved, owing to a discrepancy between English and Hawaiian versions, but it will be for life. The cause of the difficulty is the use of the word “term” in English, which led to some doubt in the mind of the court whether a simple sentence for life would be sufficient, or whether a term of years would have to be fixed.

June 20, 1892

Owing to the nature of this extraordinary murder case, it was found impossible to give a full report of it by furnishing the lengthy evidence produced in court, which was the most revolting ever placed on record in this kingdom. The following narrative covers the principal facts brought out in the trial, which, it will be seen, has not been concluded, only one of the several indictments having been tried.

On Thursday afternoon, June 9, after great difficulty in selecting a native jury, occurred the trial of the Lanai murderers before the Circuit Court at Wailuku. A brief abstract of the case, from the testimony presented to the jury, is as follows: On Thursday, February 11, the woman Pulolo, who claimed to be a kahuna and to have at her command a spirit named Kiilikina, had two of her soldiers, Keliikuewa and Kakaio, seize her husband and hold him, while she beat him cruelly and cut his feet with broken bottles till he could not walk. Not satisfied with this, she commenced punishing a little boy, six years old, the son of her eldest brother, Kalu.

Another brother, Hoopii, being sceptical as to her supernatural powers, at her command was seized and held by some of her attendants, while this inhuman wretch burned him most horribly with torches ignited from a large fire in the dwelling nearby. While in the witness box, Hoopii brought tears to the eyes of some of the audience, and caused execrations to come from the lips of others, by exhibiting the fearful scars received during this fiendish torturing. At the time he was so exhausted by the pain and punishment that he could scarcely move, only groan with agony.

Her vampire instincts remaining still unquenched, she took the boy, Kaialiilii, in hand again, and buffeted him about till he bled profusely at the nose and mouth, while his father and others stood by and silently witnessed this new act of cruelty. The poor stripling cried to his parent again and again for help, but the poor superstitious creature did not dare (or perhaps wish) to move hand or foot to succor his tortured offspring.

This brutal sorceress finally put an end to the boy’s sufferings by sitting on his head till it bent to his waist, like a broken reed, and life was extinct. The poor little corpse was then taken and laid out on a mat, and the helpless Hoopii was placed beside it with his face to the wall guarded by the so-called soldiers.

Her next victim was her sister, whom she suffocated with the assistance of Kaholokai, by thrusting her head into hot sand. After this, the body of her dead sister was placed on the matting beside the boy’s; she then ordered her satellites to seize her late assistant Kaholokai, and they held him fast while she beat him to death.

During the night the house, which at this time much resembled a morgue, caught fire, but was saved from destruction by the men near at hand. Early the next morning, February 12, a council of war was held to decide how best to cover up the dark deeds of the previous night. Her instructions to her tools were to say, when interrogated, that the boy’s death resulted from sickness; that the man, Kaholokai, lost his life in the fire which attacked the house on the night before; that the girl, her sister, died in a fit.

The next move in this frightful tragedy after removing the bodies of the boy and woman was to cremate Kaholokai’s corpse, by burning the house, with all its furniture and effects; thus hoping to give an appearance of accidental conflagration. The other two bodies were afterwards burned. After the destruction of the dwelling and the bodies, the murderess and her retinue spent the night at a neighbor’s house some distance away.

The jury, on Friday, the 10th inst., brought in a unanimous verdict of murder in the second degree against Pulolo (twenty years in prison) and four of the men, for the murder of the boy. The remainder of the ten persons arrested were discharged on this count, but were held (as well as the five already found guilty) to answer two other indictments—for the murders of the woman and man. Owing to the terrible pitch of popular feeling on Maui, there will probably be a change of venue granted before another trial takes place.

As to the motive for these unprecedented crimes, it is difficult to conjecture. The reason given out generally among Hawaiians is this: that Pulolo and her brother-in-law, one of her willing tools, wished to marry, and in order to consummate their purpose, it was necessary to put the husband of one and the wife of the other out of the way. The other horrible acts were perpetrated to conceal their real intention. The intensity of popular feeling among the natives is not directed against kahunaism as a practice, but against this imposter, who has falsely claimed the powers of a Hawaiian magician.

During Thursday, p.m., the 16th and 17th inst., the foreign jury distinguished itself by rapid and thorough work. The jury is probably the best one, taken as a whole, that has been summoned to try cases on Maui for a number of years. Last night Judge Bickerton excused them until Monday morning. Today some native divorce cases are under consideration.

June 23, 1892

News came by the steamer W.
G. Hall
that a native wahine by the name of Kaaiai, of Kailua, Hawaii, tried to imitate the fiendish work of Pulolo, the notorious Lanai murderess. This woman is also a kahuna, and her neighbors are said to have obeyed her commands with superstitious fear. It is said that a few weeks ago, she ordered her sentinels to drag a kanaka about the place, after which a hole was dug to bury him alive. The sentinels were about to carry out her instructions, but were prevented by the timely appearance of others who took him out. The kahuna and her attendants were tried before the district judge of the place and were fined $100 each and costs.

June 27, 1892

Pulolo,
the kahuna murderess, was sentenced to fifty years’ imprisonment.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson (1850-1894), wandering Scottish author of
Treasure Island
and
Kidnapped
who spent his last years in the South Seas, twice visited Hawaii. In May, 1889, he spent twelve days residing in the isolation colony on the island of Molokai, where the devoted Father Damien de Veuster had labored among the lepers until his recent death. On his return to Honolulu, Stevenson remarked: “There are Molokais everywhere.” He was to confirm this truth the following year on another cruise of the South Pacific.

“Another Molokai” concluded a series of letters contributed to the New York
Sun
in 1891 and seldom reprinted.

IN 1890, when I was at Penrhyn [in the Cook Islands], Mr. Hird was supercargo on the
Janet Nicoll
; and knowing I had visited the Lazaretto on Molokai, he called me in consultation. “It is strange,” said he. “When I was here there was no such thing as leprosy upon the island; and now there seems a great deal. Look at that man, and tell me what you think.” The man was leprous as Naaman.

The story goes that a leper escaped from Molokai in an open boat and landed, some say in Penrhyn, some say first in Manihiki. There are many authentic boat voyages difficult to credit; but this of thirty degrees due north and south, and from the one trade to the other across the equatorial doldrums, ranks with the most extraordinary. We may suppose the westerly current to have been entirely intermitted, the easterly strong, and the fugitive well supplied with food. Or we may explain the tale to be a legend, framed to conceal the complaisance of some ill-judging skipper. One thing at least is sure: a Hawaiian leper, in an advanced stage of the disease, and admitting that he had escaped from Molokai, appeared suddenly in these distant islands, and was seen by Mr. H. J. Moors of Apia walking at large in Penrhyn. Mr. Moors is not quite certain of the date, for he visited the atoll in 1883 and again in 1884; but another of my neighbors, Mr. Harper, was trading in Penrhyn all the first year. He saw nothing of the Hawaiian, and this pins us to the later date. I am tediously particular on this point, because the result is amazing. Seven years is supposed to be the period of leprous incubation; and the whole of my tale, from the first introduction of the taint to the outbreak of a panic on the island, passes (at (he outside) in a little more than six. At the time when we should have scarce looked for the appearance of the earliest case, the population was already steeped in leprosy.

The Polynesians assuredly derive from Asia; and Asia, since the dawn of history, has been a camping ground for this disease. Of two things, either the Polynesian left, ere the disease began, and is now for the first time exposed to the contagion, or he has been so long sequestered that Asiatic leprosy has had the time to vary, and finds in him a virgin soil. The facts are not clear; we are told, on one hand, that some indigenous form of the disease was known in Samoa within the memory of man; we are assured, on the other, that there is not a name for it in any island language. There is no doubt, at least, about the savage rapidity with which it spreads when introduced. And there is none that, when a leper is first seen, the islanders approach him without disaffection and are never backward to supply him with a wife. I find this singular; for few races are more sensitive to beauty, of which their own affords so high a standard; and I have observed that when the symptoms are described to him in words, the islander displays a high degree of horror and disgust. His stringent ideals of courtesy and hospitality and a certain debile kindliness of disposition must explain his conduct. As for the marriage, the stranger once received, it follows as a thing of course. To refuse the male is still considered in most parts of Polynesia a rather unlovely rigor in the female; and if a man be disfigured, I believe it would be held a sort of charity to console his solitude. A kind island girl might thus go to a leper’s bed in something of the same spirit as we visit the sick at home with tracts and pounds of tea.

The waif who landed on Penrhyn was much marred with the disease; his head deformed with growths; a thing for children to flee from screaming. Yet he was received with welcome, entertained in families, and a girl was found to be his wife. It is hard to be just to this Hawaiian. Doubtless he was a man of a wild strain of blood, a lover of liberty and life; doubtless he had harbored in the high woods and the rains, a spectral Robin Hood, armed to defend his wretched freedom; perhaps he was captured fighting; and of one thing we may be sure, that he had escaped early from the Lazaretto, still untamed, still hot with resentment. His boat voyage was a discipline well fitted to inspire grave thoughts; in him it may have only sharpened the desire of pleasure; for to certain shallow natures the imminence of death is but a whet. In his own eyes he was an innocent prisoner escaped, the victim of a nameless and senseless tyranny. What did he ask? To taste the common lot of men, to sit with the house folk, to hear the evensong, to share in the day’s gossip, to have a wife like others, and to see children round his knees. He landed in Penrhyn, enjoyed for a while simple pleasures, died, and bequeathed to his entertainers a legacy of doom.

They were early warned. Mr. Moors warned them in 1884, and they made light of his predictions, the long incubation of the malady deceiving them. The leper lived among them; no harm was seen. He died, and still there was no harm. It would be interesting, it is probably impossible, to learn how soon the plague appeared. By the midst of 1890, at least, the island was dotted with lepers, and the
Janet Nicoll
had not long gone before the islanders awoke to an apprehension of their peril. I have mentioned already traits which they share with their Paumotuan kindred; their conduct in this hour of awakening is another. There were certain families—twenty, I was told; we may imply a corrective and guess ten—entirely contaminated; the clean waited on these sick and bade them leave the settlement.

Some six years before they had opened their doors to a stranger; now they must close them on their next of kin.